David O'Mahony: Perspective in art and life is a good thing

Given the proliferation of AI slop in the creative arts arena, the only way to stand out in a sea of mediocrity is to do so something that stands out

AI couldn’t create that iconic photograph of Roy Keane holding a raven’s skull by Murdo Macleod — the one where the beak is open just enough that you can see Keane’s eye. File picture: with permission from the Crawford Art Gallery

It’s easy to feel a sense of doom and gloom in the creative fields, given the seemingly unstoppable march of AI.

This is not one of those columns.

You can despair or go on creating art. Yeats spent years pining for Maude Gonne, and look what he created (she even told him this while rejecting yet another pass at her). 

In the middle of the First World War, poetry abounded. Did music, song, and painting die a death in Cork just because the city centre was burned down twice? No. 

There were people half freezing to death in caves thousands of years ago who decided to paint the walls just to show they had been there, and had done something.

Perspective, in art as well as life, is a very good thing.

I even saw a fellow author on Threads this past week lamenting that they thought this would be the last generation of human-made writing. 

In the name of the Dagda. There are opinions, and there are panic stations.

We have no need for panic mode. I mean, I know a writer in the US who is physically disabled but still uses accessibility technology like voice to text to both write and edit professionally. 

If she can get by just fine without turning to generative AI for her art, then what excuse have the rest of us?

While there is a sizeable backlash against the use of AI in artistic fields — the actor Ethan Hawke refers to it as “the plagiarism machine”, and many small publishers I work with refuse to accept AI-generated work — that doesn’t mean it isn’t being used. 

And it is, sometimes to great fanfare by the individuals in question, more often surreptitiously because they’ve seen the blowback elsewhere.

AI the 'next industrial revolution'

You may have seen the footage circulating of a woman being booed for saying that AI is “the next industrial revolution” during a speech at a graduation ceremony. 

She seems quite taken aback by it, laughing awkwardly while looking for support from somebody — anybody — on stage with her.

It’s not gatekeeping, either. Having AI generate a story or even a book and rewriting it doesn’t make you a writer any more than using prompts in Midjourney or Nano Banana make you a painter.

AI couldn’t create that iconic photograph of Roy Keane holding a raven’s skull by Murdo Macleod — the one where the beak is open just enough that you can see Keane’s eye. 

It could try to copy it, yes, but probably mangle it in the attempt. Probably give him six fingers on one hand, or just ignore part of the instructions.

Given that ChatGPT once invented a whole series of history articles I had supposedly written — and they sounded good too, dammit — I’m pretty sure if you asked AI to generate a story about Fr Mathew it would probably give him two Ts.

To prove a point to myself for the sake of this article, I asked an AI app to generate an image of “Bosco in his box”, and it offered a terrier asleep in a cardboard box. Tá sé go huafásach.

Financial impact of AI on various artists

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a significant impact on various artists. It has cost many of them work. 

Book designers, marketing content specialists, even fashion photographers have all seen incomes dive because what they would have done has been outsourced to an AI app.

And all that slop sort of looks the same, doesn’t it? And the only way to stand out in a sea of mediocrity is, well, to do so something that stands out, isn’t it?

A human touch, you could say.

In recent weeks, the palace of Versailles hosted two performances of an AI-composed play that was written in the style of the 17th-century writer Moliere. 

Culturally, I’m not sure what his equivalent is here. Yeats, maybe. Or, Oscar Wilde. Corkonians could argue for Conal Creedon. 

The point is more that Moliere is something of a big deal, and something of a high point in French culture. So trying to create something he might have written is also a big deal. 

It would be like getting a computer to puke out a sequel to The Field.

Yet that took some 20,000 interactions between the team behind the project, the AI tool they used (Le Chat), and assorted experts on Moliere’s work. 

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The initial story it generated was a paltry eight pages. Even after all the work was done and the show shown, the feedback ranged from very good to “any decent writer could have done this”.

Imagine spending a fortune in time and AI tokens only for the response to be “meh”. They would have done it faster, with fewer headaches, if they’d just hired somebody to write the thing. 

Most of us could do that for free just by banging out the most unhinged text you can imagine. At least then we’d be content that at least we were human.

But, even allowing for composition by robot, the performance, sets, costumes, and all that jazz had to be provided by flesh and blood. 

There’ll always be the need for a human touch — and there’ll always be the demand for it, too. I sometimes think of it as being organic, free-range art. 

Remember how Corcadorca used to turn chunks of Cork City into an open-air theatre? I’d like to see generative AI do that.

So the rumours of human art’s demise are, I would argue, greatly exaggerated. Looks like the answer all along was to be yourself, the way the human-made stories of old have always told us.

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